Structure, naming and number of Java forums - and forums in general

[rolf_paulsen]

Hi forum,

recently I discovered several cross postings in the forums "Java Programming", "Java EE @ SAP", and "SAP NetWeaver AS, Java". On the one hand, this is annoying, on the other hand, it is somewhat obvious because for new members and for some issues it is not easy to find the best fit forum.

I'd like to suggest to rethink the forum structure for Java themes.

Is is still appropriate to show the Java-forums mixed up with the ABAP AS forums?

CE-NetWeaver Java forums can be found under "SAP NetWeaver" (e.g. Composite Application Framework, Visual Composer and the NWDI-forum with the record breaking name "SAP NetWeaver Development Infrastructure (NWDI, formerly known as JDI)") but the "pure" Java programming under group "Application Server". So the whole Java environment is split and both parts are mixed with ABAP themes.

A suggestion is to open a Composition Environment group of forums and maybe get rid of some forums by aggregating e.g. Java programming and Java EE @ SAP.

Anyone else who stumbled over this in her/his SDN beginning?

Regards

Rolf

Edited by: Thomas Zloch on Aug 30, 2010 3:51 PM - subject extended to allow for fruitful discussion

[Former Member]

In my opinion the only real solution for this problem is to discard the fixed forum structure and instead use [tagging|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29] (like SAP does already for blogs, etc.). This would eliminate cross-postings, though of course users might still try multiple postings if they don't get an answer.

However, the real benefits would be the increased flexibility to quickly introduce new categories (whenever required - though this should obviously be limited to some people to avoid an explosion of categories) and better categorization (more specific). E.g. I might just be interested in JCo3 stuff and not all generic Java postings. Not to mention the power that comes when you can start querying by combining different tags...

The part that really bothers me though is that so many people don't seem to make any effort to even choose some remotely relevant forum. I doubt that those folks would pick appropriate tags. Maybe a solution would be to have some counter that keeps track of postings that were inappropriate (content, wrong forum, etc.). Once a certain threshold is reached, the person would need to get approval by somebody for the next N postings (or what about an [Iditotentest|http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medizinisch-Psychologische_Untersuchung] or [here|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Psychological_Assessment] for the English version). Some might end up creating new user ID's, but maybe some would start to think and be more careful?!

Cheers, harald

p.s.: My apologies for a very generic answer to your specific question...

[rolf_paulsen]

Hi Harald,

thanks for your reply. I really like the reference to the MPU No need to apologize.

I agree that tagging is the real solution (look e.g. at bugzilla at eclipse and many other examples) but I did not want to open a great claim since I am still quite new to SDN. And I feel it is more likely to take a small step than a very big one in near future.

I cannot find your suggestion in the wihslist in thread "Suggestions for forum improvements " in this forum, so please let me know if I may post it there.

For the short term it is of course difficult and maybe not worth-while the time to change the structure. If only I knew what "short term" means. This raises the question about the direction of SDN forums and the effort that SAP itself brings into the infrastructure of the forums.

Within the last months I got used to SDN forums and the restricted functionality, but I remember my first click from the nice sdn.sap.com on "Forums" and the first impression of the categories. A mix of marketing / survey terms (e.g. SAP Solutions), very common titles (SOA, ABAP Development, Industries), and very special titles (Crystal Reports...). Already the categories witness an uncontrolled (or low controlled) growth of the forums in the past. If you do not know the average content of the forums that might be interesting for you, you have long odds even to pick up the correct category, not only an apropriate forum.

Nice, timely and fun is something different.

Regards,

Rolf

[Former Member]

Hi Rolf,

I know I had a couple of references to tagging in our meta thread about SCN (e.g. see ). However, the tagging request doesn't seem to appear in the summary yet. In case you haven't seen it, check out Otto's nice blog on [SCN infrastructure 2.0|http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/20704] [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken];, which provides some background on SCN and also gives the heads up for future changes.

Being new to SCN is an ideal qualification for commenting on odd things or what could be changed. So please keep posting suggestions as SAP is listening (so your voice matters). We all benefit from having more people looking at this and throwing in useful ideas - it's a shame that usually only a handful of (the same) people discuss those meta questions...

Anyhow, hopefully somebody from SAP picks up your original specific request on the Java forum structure and comments from their perspective.

Cheers, harald

p.s.: You've probably seen that I love to point to [stackoverflow|http://stackoverflow.com] for a nice design on a Q&A site; the tagging features they have look good to me, especially also the option to [combine them|http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/10/tags-and-tags-or-tags/] (e.g. see my comments in , where unfortunately the formatting of some of my postings got messed up after some time - a result of some SCN bug, sigh).

[OttoGold]

Oh, man, you sold it again!

[Former Member]

Absolutely not. This was just a quick test to see if you're paying attention - I grant you a PASSED, since the delay in your answer seems to indicate yet that you haven't automated your responses, but are actually really reading all that stuff (hhmm, maybe you anticipated that though and just put in some automated posting delay?!)...

Cheers, harald